Certainly our Monetize Your Knowledge course can send people’s heads spinning with all the things you can monetize and how you can monetize them.

This question was posed by Kathryn and this what she asked:

Our second lesson, Delivering Your Knowledge, covers this well, but I think it’s worth further discussion in the form of 3 rules I’ve put together for you.

3 Rules of Monetization

Disclaimer: These are rules I’m putting out there for you on what I believe will guide you to the best monetization plan for you. It’s based on my own experience and those of my clients and students. You may find the need to break any or all of the rules if it is in your business’ best interest. Your business…your decision!

1. Start with One and Then Grow

If you’re just getting started or finally ramping up your monetization efforts, you don’t have to tackle every monetization method. Pick something based on the pros/cons charts in lesson 2 based on your interests and profitability potential…then run with it. Add more once you have some results and have time/resources to start working on more.

2. You don’t have to monetize EVERYTHING

While I think most online business owners lean toward not monetizing enough, sometimes when they get rolling they shift to the other extreme and want to monetize every single thing.

Many people might think I suggest this because you don’t want to overdo the monetization or you’ll alienate your readers. This may or may not be true and is not my primary concern.

What I am concerned about the time spent in adding multiple affiliate links, for example, to every single article or piece of content. You can get bogged down in spending so much time adding promotions, but they don’t produce enough in return. Your time is incredibly valuable and if you’re not seeing a return right away, it can get very frustrating.

For example, if you’re just starting a content site and you’re publishing large volumes of content, you can spend a LOT of time adding links to pages that aren’t getting much traffic. While you work on traffic, choose a monetization method that doesn’t require laborious per page work. Instead, add Google Adsense or some other site-wide promotion and then go back and work on specific pages as you build your traffic to those specific pages.

Yes, targeted promotions are key (that’s why Adsense is a good option), but your time is the most important thing to consider. Get it out there and get it seen…then you’ll know what to monetize further.

3. Review and Improve

Track your progress and review what’s working and what isn’t. And yep, you guess it…do more of what works and a whole lot less of what doesn’t. Track your links, check your stats and adjust.

If you’re an affiliate, set up a tracking link where they are available. If you’re selling your own products, set up your own tracking. Knowing what’s working will allow you to grow by leaps and bounds.

Get Started!

You’ll never know what works until you get started. If you haven’t started yet, go back to Lesson 2 and let’s get this thing going!

Over the years, I’ve always encouraged my readers to keep their email marketing targeted.

And by targeted, I mean everything from how you build your list all the way to how you manage it. The more targeted you are, the easier it is to profit. You don’t need a huge list, you just need to know who you are marketing to and why.

The proof of just how much targeting works surprised even me this past week when I sent out a mailing two do different lists, with one list being just under 2% of the size of the other.

The virtual world is jam packed with blogs, content sites and tons of people hoping to make a name for themselves…and a living online.

But we all know that the reality is so very few get to where they really want to be. Sometimes it’s a change in mindset that’s needed or the ability to be more persuasive in their writing. Or perhaps knowing how to leverage the content of others can help make the shift.

At first productivity wasn’t a topic I paid much attention to. But over the last few years, I’ve noticed a few things really, really help in terms of productive writing.

I’ve written over 1,300 articles over the last 3 years. I’ve found that at times I can just blast through my task list and write a half dozen articles in one sitting, while at other times I couldn’t get a single word out.

It took some time, but I believe I’ve found a few things that help with being able to write productively. Here’s what I’ve found. [Read more...]

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Testimonials

I absolutely agree. Email marketing for our team still gets the best results by far over any social media channel. We launched our first info product for one of the groups we work with in March...a very targeted list of about 300 people (at that time). We've been consistently emailing this group for the last 2 years. We follow the Contentrix model of email marketing, conversational selling. The first thing we did was to warm them up to the info product for about 6 weeks prior to launch.

The first week we launched the product, we only emailed this list and the product did a little over $1,000 in sales the 3 days (a $37 product). Needless to say for our first info product (we typically provide website services for this group), we were very excited! Now we're going to repeat the process with additional info products for this group and other groups we work with.